it is usual! I was afraid it was," he said in a miserable voice.
"What on earth is to be done about it?"

"Why, there's nothing to be done, except just grin and bear it," she said
bravely enough, and with the conviction of one who has thought a matter
out thoroughly.

"Then it's monstrous! Just monstrous, that the most charming and
loveliest creature in the world should be bullied by that infernal
brute!" he cried, and put his arm around her.

The Countess was on the very point of slipping out of it when the cat
Melchisidec came out of the bushes a dozen yards ahead of them, and
with Melchisidec came a very distinct vision of Lord Loudwater's
flushed, distorted, and revolting face as he swore at her at breakfast
that morning.

She did not slip out of the encircling arm, and Grey bent his head and
kissed her lightly on the lips.

It was the gentlest, lightest kiss, the kiss he might have given a
pretty child, just a natural tribute to beauty and charm.

But the harm was done. The population of Great Britain cannot really be
more than one and a half persons to the acre, and the great majority of
them live, thousands to the acre, in towns; yet it is indeed difficult
to kiss a girl during the daytime in any given acre, however thickly
wooded, without being seen by some superfluous sojourner on that acre;
and whether, or no, it was that the green frock and hat brought the
Countess the bad luck the fortuneteller had foretold, there was a
witness to that kiss.

Undoubtedly, too, it was not the right kind of witness. If it had been an
indulgent elder not given to gossip, or a chivalrous young man not averse
himself from kisses, all might have been well. But William Roper,
under-gamekeeper, was a young man without a spark of chivalry in him, and
he had been soured in the matter of kisses by the steadfast resolve of
the young women of the village to suffer none from him. He was an
unattractive young man, not unlike the ferrets he kept at his cottage. He
was the last young man in the world, or at any rate in the neighbourhood,
to keep silent about what he had seen.

Even so, no great harm might have been done. He might have blabbed about
the matter in the village, and the whole village and the servants of the
Castle might have talked about it for weeks and months, or even years,
without it reaching the ears of Lord Loudwater. But William Roper saw in
that kiss his royal road to Fortune. Ambitious in the grain, he was not